WINNER OF THE 2025 THOMAS E. KENNEDY NOVEL AWARD

Swimming in a secluded lake near her Georgia home, 40-something waitress Phoebe is startled by a figure watching her from the shore. When she exits the water, nearly blind without her glasses, the stranger wrestles her to the stony ground and assaults her.

Hundreds of miles north, family man and successful attorney George Paxton pauses in the midst of mowing his lawn to stretch out on the grass. Staring up into the vast blue sky he sees a dirigible float by overhead––a sight so inexplicably stirring, George vows to ply the skies in such a craft himself––consequences be damned.

Ensoulment follows Phoebe as she juggles low paid work and an unforeseen pregnancy, and George as his obsession with airships compels him to abandon his marriage and lucrative career. Each shed the lives they have known to embrace the souls they were born to be, drawing toward each other in the process––in spirit and, ultimately, in fact, when George, aloft in his dirigible, is brought down to earth—and into Phoebe’s world—by a raging storm.

Author: Susan Forrest Castle
248 pages, 2025
Literature | Novel
ISBN: Paperback: 9781947175952 / Hardcover: 9781947175891

Writer, painter and photographer SUSAN FORREST CASTLE was a senior writer at Sotheby’s and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City and is the author of Richard Segalman: Black and White | Muses, Magic & Monotypes, published by The Artist Book Foundation in 2015. Her artwork has been exhibited in several U.S. cities, in Waterford, Ireland and in Venice, Italy where she has been an artist-in-residence at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica di Venezia and at Venezia Contemporanea. She lives in Baden-Württemberg, Germany and the United States.  susanforrestcastle.com

“A work of rare originality and psychological insight that probes deeply into the essence of human nature. Where does a human soul come from? How and when is it formed? To what extent are we—and our destinies—shaped by external forces and events, and to what extent are those events shaped by who we are? With this moving tale of disparate lives united by fate and circumstance, Susan Forrest Castle casts such metaphysical questions into a superb, solid drama, in equal measure subtle and sensational.”

—Peter Nichols, author of The Rocks and Granite Harbor

“This is a novel of dreamy proportions…A debut in which Susan Forrest Castle uses her background in art to create the art of the nearly impossible: a work of fiction which literally lifts off from earth, into a realm of reclamation of that very thing we all strive for: our souls.” 

––Jacki Lyden, former NPR host; author, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba